Her Midlife Miracle

A Dream Come True

Over the next year, she dated widely. Without using her own photo or name, she even went on a match.com date  but no luck. Eventually, despairing thoughts began to creep into her head: "For women of a certain age, how do you meet a guy, fall in love, and decide he's the right man to have children with? Your clock's ticking, you're looking at him, and it's a crazy, pressure-filled experience."

No crazier than the way she eventually did meet Mr. Right. It was December 2004, in Los Angeles, and, Cross says, "there I was again, all alone for the holidays." As she was crossing a street near her home, she found herself taken with the stride and demeanor of the man walking in front of her, even though she could barely see his face. "I thought maybe there was some reason why I found him so magnetic, like maybe he was an actor and I'd recognize him as soon as he turned around," Cross recalls. She followed him into a flower shop, but didn't get up the nerve to approach him or even get a good look at him before he left with his purchase. Curious, Cross asked the woman behind the counter if the man was anyone famous. No, the woman said, he wasn't, but did Cross want to leave her number in case he came in again? Yes, she did.

The man, Tom Mahoney, who'd never been married, did return to that shop and got Cross's number. He called her the day she found out she'd been nominated for a Golden Globe. "He didn't say anything [about the award]," Cross says with a sly smile. "And I thought, That's really good; he's a regular guy. So we went on a date."

Early on, it became clear that both were interested in starting a family, and the couple wasted no time once they were married. Now that Cross is pregnant, "she exudes this incredible sense of gratefulness," says Hatcher. "She's so excited to meet her babies." But Cross does not want to be seen as a one-woman advertisement for older moms. "We went to a fertility doctor," she confides, "but it's difficult on the woman, it's difficult on the marriage, and not everyone can afford it. I'm glad there are actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon and other 30ish women who are having their kids younger, which is a better example than the way I'm doing it, at the eleventh hour."

When Cross and her husband listened to an ultrasound and heard two heartbeats, which signaled twins, Cross says they were in shock. Although they tried to keep it a secret, word soon leaked out. For now, though, they're planning on keeping the gender of the twins private: "We're going to try to have one thing for ourselves," she says.

Cross does have one regret: Her own children may not have as many years to share with her as she has had with her own parents (her mother, Janet, 71, is a former math teacher; her father, Mark, 82, a retired personnel manager). "I've had the time to go through all the life phases with my parents," she says, "from being a bratty teenager, pushing them away, to saying later on, 'Oh my God, I can't believe what you did for me  thank you. I love you so much.'" When she thinks about how she and her kids may not be able to go through some of those stages together, her eyes brim with tears. "But I have good genes in my family," she says, brightening, "so we'll see just how long I'll be around."

After so many years of being on her own, merging her life with someone else's could have been tricky. But Cross says she and Mahoney mostly avoided tensions, partly because they both left their own homes and bought a new house together. As for finding each other at this point in their lives, "If we had met in our 20s, we would have been ships in the night," Cross maintains. "He had his journey to go on, and I had mine."

She also welcomes their differences: "That's a real joy for me because he possesses stability and I've got an impulsive side. It's a wonderful combination." Yet they both come from Irish Catholic families, and Cross believes they have similar values. As the oldest of seven, Mahoney is accustomed to taking on responsibilities, and Cross says it's the little things he does  arranging lights along the staircase so she won't stumble if she gets up at night, or bringing her breakfast in bed  that show how much he genuinely cares. One of the first things he did when they married was update his life insurance policy. "Isn't it nice to have a guy who's thinking about the future and making sure that you're OK?" she asks rhetorically. It is indeed  especially when you've waited half a lifetime to find him.

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